Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 95

This post is a transcript of Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 95, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!

Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 95 – Full Transcript

Disco forgot to enable audio when he rendered the video last night, so there’s no audio on the stars floating by.

Intro video is playing, but has no music.

Disco is now doing the music with his voice. Ben ‘my god it’s full of stars’

And they’re live! We’ve got Disco, Ben, Justin, and Alexis. And Tyler in the bottom.

Last week CIG’s ‘stream box’ died. This week it’s kinda back, but they don’t have any audio from Tyler.

Week in Review! – Disco welcomes Ben and Alexis back.

Ben’s 3 weeks – Alexis’ father sadly passed away three weeks ago. They went home to grieve and take care of things. Ben thanks the SC community for the outstanding support they’ve given throughout. Clifford, INN, TEST, Redacted etc… sent flowers. Helped them a lot, and they appreciate all the kindness and the thoughts.

They’re glad to be home back into the regular SC routine. Alexis thanks everyone as well.

This week! Lots of catchup for Ben, some ship kickoffs, including the Carrack review (it’s going into active graybox / whitebox)

Lots of planning for Gamescom and Cit Con. Lots of work on 2.4, there are a couple of ‘go-no go’ meetings per day right now. 2.4 hit PTU last night (NOT LIVE).

When they film an AtV on a week where they expect a patch, they do a few version for different scenarios. It’s not happening, it’s going out today, etc… and Ben said ‘live’ in all three takes re:2.4

Ben has no recollection of AtV this week at all. He was on around 2 hours of sleep and a plane trip while filming it.

Ben was also on various drugs for anxiety for the flight. He has no memory of hosting AtV.

Debuted a brand-new hosting set – Tera. It’s not ‘tera-ble’ – Ali.

Revamped News from Around the ‘Verse section. The original overlay was the first thing Disco ever did for CIG, so it was time to spruce it up.

They’re all on diets, but they’ve been doing lots of work on the buccaneer sale. They’ve filmed some segments with Jim Martin. Jim Martin’s one of the original ship designers. He’s normally a bigwig Hollywood ship designer, and Jim volunteered early on to help. He did the Scythe, the Freelancer, the Cutlass, etc… He’s kinda the ‘drake’ guy now.

Jim did the ships in Starship Troopers, Space: Above and Beyond, the Defiant for DS-9, etc.. Ben’s interview will be next week, and then there’s another video where Disco fan-boys out a few weeks after that.

Coming with 2.4, you get the ability to start arranging flair around the hangar.

Ben’s brother got him a Bat’leth. Disco got a Lightsaber.

Disco and Ben are playing with their swords. Toast is blowing bubbles in the background.

Moving now to 2.4 on PTU!- 2.4 is on PTU. They opened up 2.4 to 5000 new people, and they’ll probably add more over the course of the day. They’ll look at numbers and bug reports etc…

Still lots of work to do on 2.4. It’s one of the biggest patches, biggest since 2.0. Flyable Starfarer, reliant in hangar, shopping system, a complete refactoring of the game to add persistence. Hangars run on servers now instead of on local PC’s, item port system is in, allows ships and characters, everything is connected to item port.

On the surface level it looks cool, but under the hood, it lays the groundwork for everything else that’s coming in the rest of the year.

For those wondering, bubbles are still floating past the camera.

Where’s my Spaceship!

Buccaneer sale next Friday. It’s the second main-line Pirate fighter. It’s going to hopefully do things that people want to Cutlass to do. Focused more on weapons and manoeuvrability. It’s a ‘scrapper’. Look inspired by attack helicopters and an A-10. They’re putting together marketing material for it, Turbulent have a mini-game for it, etc…

The F7A hornet is getting prepared for SQ42 in the UK, Chris Smith is working on that. The Herald is really close. They’re about to move onto the Carrack. The Carrack will be very cool, cause Crusader keeps expanding, and when the two collide cool stuff should happen.

And now it’s the Question and Answer segment of the show!

[Which team is making the Reclaimer?] It will end up being the folks in the UK. They’ll be doing all the larger ships, but it doesn’t have a person right now.

[Yesterday we saw yesterday someone destroying panels in ATV Fast Forward, will we be able to specialize in repairing them?] There will be some form of repairing, to what extent we don’t know yet as all the piping stuff is prototyping, they’re just exploring different mechanics they can include and such.

[Will we see the Reliant core and variants in 2.4?] No, just the base reliant. With a number of exceptions, they’re doing base ships first before variants. One of the meetings Ben had this week was to talk about the Aurora and the 300 series though.

[DogTags making a return?] Currently in production with the SQ42 ones. They usually bring them back once a year, so they might do them again in fall.

[Will persistence continually evolve?] Absolutely. Everything will evolve as development progresses. This is the beachhead into persistence, but now they’re looking into other things. Chris is now talking about object persistence for abandoned ships, and how to make them last longer, etc… they’re gonna work on persistence a lot.

[When can we get new ship commercials?] Cinematic assets are all working on SQ42 right now, that’s the big focus. They trained folks early-on on the commercials. Once they free up, they’ll make more ship commercials.

[Will 2.4 come with a new keyboard map?] Yes. They had one, and as part of development from Evocati and stuff they’ve been changing keys. When they’re confident on what 2.4’s map will be, there should be some graphics for it. Folks in the UK have a giant design post about the changes they’re making, and it’ll be in the 2.4 live post when that goes out.

[New pictures of the 85X?] None yet, but it is on the schedule.

They agreed that it didn’t need a full concept artist. The current one is cool, so they just need work on how two people fit in it.

Initial patch notes went up last night for five minutes, and everything that said ‘cloud’ said ‘butt’ instead, cause the person that put it up had a app on his PC to turn every instance of ‘cloud’ with ‘butt’.

[Will there be any ships held back to only be released when the game goes live?] They will continue developing ships until they are older and greyer.

[Is the new patch system coming?] They’re actively working on differential patching, yes. Not today, not tomorrow, but it’s in active development.

Should bring patches down from 20+ gigs to much much less.

[Plans on having an anniversary sale with almost all ships available?] They usually do do that in November.

[Orange Big Benny’s polo shirt?] Maybe. They’ll get through the first shirt first.

[Can we have a picture of the Buccaneer soon?] Soon

[Will the Vanguard Warden come back on sale?] Maybe someday.

[How has the Evocati testing been going?] Fantastic, great results Will said. They do wish they explained the process a bit better at first because it created confusion amongst PTU testers. They don’t don’t tend to talk about stuff until it’s actually going. They’re not only developing a game, but process of how to do it.

[Ben – You are the ‘which ship next’ man, are you also ‘how ships feel and fly’ man?] Ben gives vague feelings, designers and QA and such deal more with how ships feel and fly.

Look and animations, once those are locked down, feel of the ship can change very easily. When you have on paper never works immediately.

[Why is the Dragonfly not out yet?] It’s in the near-term, you’ll be seeing it in the not too distant future. You never know how long it’s going to take a visual concept you like though, so it’s not going to be just ‘two weeks and we’re done’, they won’t say ‘go’ till they like it.

Same with the Polaris, which is being worked on. Artist on that got the look in one pass, and it worked right-off, where they had another ship that took weeks and weeks and weeks, and they were like ‘it looks cool’ but it looked cool cause it was like one from Elite: Dangerous, so they had to do another pass on it. There’s no predicting how long a ship can take to find its ‘look’

[Updates on Saitek joystick?] Nothing since Ben got back. They were supposed to have the test articles in the UK already, but the prototypes aren’t ready yet. They’re just waiting for the prototypes still.

[Why is the Carrack before the BMM in the pipeline?] Because they have the Anvil stuff all done, it’s the natural next one, and it’s the most popular ship. More Carrack pilots than any other ‘add-on’ ship. The BMM is still coming, they’ve been talking about Banu stuff recently, but it’s not just building the ship, they have to build the Banu ‘kit’ as well, and then they can build the BMM and other Banu ships as well.

[Shubin contest?] Disco’s going to spend this weekend going through entries with Ben and Tyler, and they’ll hopefully announce them next week. There were 35,000 entries, it takes time.

[Where will the Buccaneer sit on the production schedule?] It’s a little later this year. Not Q2, but after that. Should be a quicker one, because they have design language for Drake already, they’re building that stuff out with the Caterpillar and the Herald.

Looking Ahead!

Starting today on Twitter they’ll start a campaign to reveal the Buccaneer early. They’ll post what the thresholds are.

Monday has 10 for the Devs. Randy, and a special surprise.

Wednesday is the Subscriber RtV for the month. Disco will sit down with Jason Eyle, and Tom Sawyer They’re networking engineers who will talk about Persistence and stuff. Ahmed will sit in on it as well.

There’ll be an interview with Ben and Jim Martin on AtV, talking about the Buccaneer. Then Disco sits down with Matt Sherman to talk about the design. All about the Buccaneer on AtV next week.

Friday there’ll be RtV, and the Buccaneer sale. There’s a little game that comes with it.

Couple things later today – the space cactus will go up on the comm-link, can see what it’ll look like. Tonight will be Jump Point for subscribers. This issue covers the prospector. They’re starting a new serial fiction from Adam Weiser, going back to the Tevarin war.

They’re on the march towards Gamescom in August, they’ll be on the show floor there all five days. Volunteers are already signing up to help out with that, and there’ll be pop-up parties in the evenings.

Tyler will not be on the next two RtV’s. he’s doing other things. X-games and something else.